Are you staying in contact with your patients through email every month?

You definitely should be staying in contact with your current patients outside of their regular visits to your office.

Regular contact enables you to educate your patients. And this helps with your patient retention.

But the biggest reason to contact your patients regularly is to give them opportunities to refer their friends and family. While this should be done in person during a normal visit, I have found that sending the patient something in writing gets even more referrals.

If every new patient that starts care in your office got a letter in the mail plus an email with education and referral opportunities, do you think you will get some referrals?

Not every patient will refer someone else, but how much did it cost you in time or money to have an email company (autoresponder) send something out?

Nothing, it’s free (other than the low cost of the monthly autoresponder!)

You can also send out emails on for special events throughout the year. This notifies your patient list that your office will be focusing on specific issues and reminds them you can help their friends and family.

Here are 20 ideas you can use to send out a special broadcast email…

1. Patient appreciation days
2. Thanksgiving food drive
3. Toys for Tots at Christmas
4. Valentines day
5. Easter celebration
6. Dog days of summer
7. Back to school kids check
8. Tax man day
9. Chiropractic Birthday
10. Practice anniversary
11. Dr.’s Birthday
12. Staff’s birthday
13. Halloween bash
14. Scratch and dent sale (or we ordered too much of x product and don’t have room, need to get rid of it this week!)
15. FAQ (frequently asked questions) about chiropractic care, decompression tables, home exercises, weight loss, etc
16. July 4th
17. Labor Day or Memorial day
18. Any holiday you celebrate that I haven’t already mentioned
19. Local sports team day, i.e. Dallas Cowboys day
20. Newsflash on chiropractic or chiropractic research
21. Any current event in the news, i.e. political race, Olympics, Hurricane relief
22. Celebrity appearance event (retired, locally known sports greats that could use the money)

Do you see the possibilities for using email marketing in your practice? You could combine this with a snail mail letter or postcard as well. For example, let’s say you send a letter in the mail to announce the event, then do 1-3 follow up broadcast emails to remind your patient base of the upcoming event.

Remember, you should not be sending mass emails out through your normal email account. Most internet companies will mark your email messages as spam if you are sending out hundreds or thousands from your person account. Better to use a company that has all these snags worked out.